Saudi Complexity Too

Something else about Saudi life that comes through is that there are modern men in the country --- and women too --- who'd like sweeping change, political and economic and above all cultural freedom, but, alas, have no idea how it could ever occur. Another thing is closely related: how Saudis are not only fearful of us and inclined to explain the world to themselves and others in preposterous conspiratorial manner, but how many have been conditioned as well to hate and resent us. The pervasive sense of humiliation and paranoid-infested desires for revenge --- which explain the constant adulation of crackpot Arab dictators who defy the West (Nasser, Saddam, Assad of Syria) or terrorists like bin Laden --- also come through clearly without any didactic harping on Wright's part.

 

THE WIDER ARAB CHALLENGES

On a different plane, those of you who are contemplating a journalistic career might reflect on the strikingly effective writing in the article: the unforced portraits of Wright's fellow journalists, the detail worthy of a novelist about their characters (with no forced purple-prose), the concern for avoiding abstract generalizations in favor of factual matters that nonetheless allow you to infer what life is generally like in the Saudi world, and above all what it says about the challenges for the US in seeking to promote transformation of 22 Arab countries, 300 million strong, half of them under 15, with 500 million the likely figure in a generation.

All save Iraq now are governed by corrupt, nepotistic ruling cliques: the President-for-Life or the King or Sheik in power until he dies and a son takes over or he's killed in a coup and another clique emerges. Secret police are the ultimate prop of these regimes. They differ essentially only in two ways: the magnitude of their political brutality, and the degree of openness to the West. Both are related; both are better in Jordan and Tunisia and Morocco and even Algeria now that the extraordinarily cruel civil war with fundamentalists has wound down than they are elsewhere. The very tiny Gulf states of Qatar, Kuwait, and the UAR are also more open these days too. Egypt once had a vibrant cosmopolitan culture centered in Cairo, the site also of one of the two best universities in the Arab World, The American University. So did Lebanon, an impressive small country that once had a very energetic intellectual life, until it tore itself apart in one of the most horrendous civil wars in recent times. Even now, despite the end of the slaughter, dozens of armed militias operate freely, and harsh Syrian occupation persists, with the Syrians supporting Hezbollah in the south.

Elsewhere? The Sudan, where an Arab military clique has pursued a genocidal war against tropical Africans in the south for decades, is winding down its violence, not least under American pressure. Mauritania, like the Sudan, openly practices slavery, documented yearly by the anti-Slavery Society affiliated with the UN. In Yemen, thanks to American pressure and American special forces, the government --- however inefficient and corrupt --- is at least cracking down on the terrorist networks there. Somalia remains a warlord-divided state. Chad is a mess, bankrupt and recently engulfed in one more wave of ethnic violence, with the Arab-speaking groups in the North imposing another dictatorial regime.

 

Modernity vs. Fundamentalist Regression, Despotism, and Other Legacies

None of the 22 Arab states has shown any ability to industrialize effectively, to overcome the worst illiteracy in the world --- worse than even in much poorer tropical Africa --- to curb nepotism and corruption, to transcend the winner-take-all form of politics, or to provide equality for women. All these matters are set out and discussed at length in the unusually frank UN Arab Human Development Report 2002. See the good summary in The Economist, linked to at the buggy site:

At one time, the buggy prof had several talented Arab grad students. He even directed two successful doctoral dissertations by them, and served on the dissertation committees of four other Middle East students. One has disappeared: you have to fear for the worse. The others, fortunately, escaped or took refuge in this country, and most have had flourishing academic careers, a credit to our country. Another grad student of mine, an Iranian --- at a time when there were two other Iranians in a two-quarter seminar on global political economy --- turned out to be a secret-police colonel for the clerical-fascist regime. Believe it or not, when another student in that seminar returned briefly to visit family in Iran, he was arrested by the secret police, kept in confinement for three years, tortured systematically for most of those years . . . and the man who carried out the initial interrogation and torture was the other former student, the secret-police officer. The tortured student was eventually able to escape, thanks to copious bribes by his family. A portly guy when I had known him before his grisly ordeal, he was about 5-foot, 7-inches, and weighed around 190 pounds in those days. When I first saw him about six months after his return to this country, he was a haggard 95 pounder who walked with difficulty.

Will there be a flourishing, open intellectual life again in the Arab world?

At one time there was in Egypt and Lebanon, just a few decades ago. From the 8th until the late 12th century, it was more open and vigorously creative than European culture . . . only to lapse into what fundamentalists now regard, nostalgically, as some sort of purified Islam. The outcome? Intellectual regression and self-isolation. As the UN Arab Human Development Report 2002 notes --- a staggering statistic --- Spain with its 40 million people translates more books each year than the 300 million Arabs have done over the last 1000 years.